Who hasn’t grimaced as the heads of dandelions rear up out of an otherwise healthy garden? There is, however, a part of me that thinks that dandelions have as much right to life as any other flower in the garden, and that it is completely arbitrary to declare one plant a weed while another appears in sumptuous splendour at the Chelsea Flower Show…as if, somehow, a nasty system of discrimination extends even to plant life.

And who, as children, didn’t love watching the seeds be carried away on the wind and marvel at their lightness of being?